Oakland Pays $17 Million for NFL Raiders as Cops Fired

(Bloomberg) Oakland, California, the fifth-most crime ridden city in America, faced a $32 million budget deficit last year. It closed the gap by dismissing a fourth of its police force, more than 200 officers.

Untouched was the $17.3 million that the city pays to stage 10 games a season for the National Football League’s Oakland Raiders and to host Major League Baseball’s Athletics in the O.co Coliseum. The funds cover debt financing and operations and are supplemented by $13.3 million from surrounding Alameda County, based on data compiled by Bloomberg from public records.

“If someone calls 911, you’re looking at an indeterminate amount of time before an officer can respond,” says Barry Donelan, 40, a sergeant who is president of the Oakland police union. “Citizens are suffering.” Reversing a renewed rise in violent crime is out of the question, he says.

Now the city is under pressure to replace the 46-year-old structure to keep the Raiders. The team’s owners may move to nearby Santa Clara and share an under-construction, $1.2 billion venue with the San Francisco 49ers, or to Los Angeles, where the City Council has backed a $1.5 billion stadium hoping to lure the NFL. Losing the Raiders would leave Oakland with about $145 million in debt, which originated 17 years ago in part to bring the team back from Los Angeles. .....................(more)

4. I live in Oakland

And there is an incredible amount of dysfunction in our local government. Between the mayor, city hall, the police... there seems to be no sense of trust or any willingness to work together. The police just scramble from one emergency to another. And there is no end in sight. It takes a long time to add 200 cops and there is nothing even in the works.

I can only hope things get turned around sometime soon. Oakland is a beautiful city with a lot of good things going for it. The whole Lake Merritt area has been undergoing a huge reconstruction project and the results so far have been fabulous.